On Sat, 12 Feb 2011 09:02:32 GMT, Adam Atkinson said:
When I switched to ADSL I'm pretty sure I was offered the choice of a single public IP address on the outside of my router, or a /29 public range for my home network (and presumably also a public address for the external interface of my router). I chose the former and don't regret having done so. I can do a mixture of static and dynamic NAT to allow things from the outside into particular internal hosts if I want do.
This was in 2005, and I can very well believe this choice was not available some time later.
It's more a business question. If you're an ADSL provider, you probably want to save "multiple public IP" as a feature so you can upsell customers to "business class". There's little business case for doing it by default for Joe Sixpack (especially in a world where public IP's are getting scarce). Fortunately, in IPv6 the bit boundaries have moved, so there's no scarcity issue and "give everybody a /48 (or at least a /56)" is a no-brainer.